Thursday, June 16, 2011

window.nextTick

Node.js has a special API called process.nextTick which schedules a function to be executed immediately the next time the event loop is idle.

Web applications often try achieve a similar result using setTimeout. The problem is that setTimeout with a zero time parameter does not schedule for immediately but rather for some time a little later. This *can* lead to real performance problems.

I benchmarked a couple ways to do postMessage between workers, iframes and on the current window itself. Turns out doing postMessage on your current window might be a really good alternative to implement process.nextTick in browsers.